A Good Person
The phrase “hurt people hurt people” is often used in discussions about empathy and forgiveness. It means that patterns will keep recurring unless you know why they happen and make changes to stop them from happening again. However, another truth is that sometimes only people who are hurting can help other people who are hurting. Their experience gives them the right to say what they’ve learned and show those around them that it’s possible to do better and feel better too. That’s why support groups are so important for addicts, sick folks, bereaved individuals or victims of abuse.
In a Good Person by Zach Braff three deeply wounded characters do this for each other. This movie features some of Morgan Freeman’s and Florence Pugh’s most tender hearted performances. Both portray individuals struggling mightily toward recovery following catastrophic failures which left ruinous effects in their wake.
It may be more formally conventional than Garden State but thank goodness it’s also less self-indulgent than Wish I Were There Too! What sets A Good Person apart from his previous works is its sharp eye for detail coupled with an equally keen understanding of what makes people tick, addiction, abandonment, abuse, overwhelming loss finding some way through all this stuff even when there isn’t one and learning how (or refusing) to forgive the unforgivable: yourself included. Plus some thoughts on being good at life, as suggested by the title
Pugh stars as Alison, a carefree young woman who skims along the surface of life and does not examine her choices too deeply. She is happily engaged to Nathan (Chinaza Uche, very appealing) and making good money as a sales rep for a pharma company, telling herself that her work is not immoral because she only pushes a drug for skin disease.
Then, one day she drives her future sister and brother in law into the city to help her pick out her wedding dress. For a few seconds she takes her eyes off the road to look at the map on her phone near a construction site. She crashes into a backhoe, they are killed, she is injured.
A year later, Ryan (Celeste O’Connor), the teenage daughter of the couple who were killed, lives with Daniel (Morgan Freeman), her grandfather. The adjustment is hard on them both Ryan acts out in hostility, Alison lies on her mother’s couch all day in an oxycontin fog of addiction, trying to deaden herself against pain emotional and physical, Diane (Molly Shannon), fed up waiting for Alison to get better and doctors cutting off prescriptions, breaks her engagement. Daniel contemplates drinking again but instead finds solace in his model train set he can control it; he can even re-create his own history there.
The screenplay has structural problems, it spends so much time on addiction that it shortchanges some plot developments and relationships it gives us shorthand we’ve seen before (“I hate you,” says character looking in mirror). And we get what’s significant about that model train set long before it’s over-explained. But there’s some sharp dialogue here, and Freeman and Pugh commit to their characters with insight. Pugh is remarkable in how specific she gets at every stage of Alison’s struggle with addiction: buzzed or “blissfully numb” or frantic to get some pills, detoxing or somewhere in between.
In one scene she runs into people she once looked down on and we see layer after layer unpeel from her sense of who she is, in another, she decides she can calibrate her chemistry enough to break a pill in half, thinking she can fool people into thinking she’s not high that’s when she runs into Freeman and it’s his best moment too. We see his conflicts but he gently encourages her because what connects them transcends the pain she has caused him; it is his having been where she is that makes it impossible for her to fool him about whether or not she’s using. Daniel and Allison are stripped down to essentials here, at its best, so is the movie.
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